[Johannes]

Hi Nick

Source of Hartmann's late claims was an abschüßelist, which has proved to be completely unreliable past 1943. My co-author John Foreman always stated that once something has been published "It's cast in stone" meaning basically that typo's, mistakes and mis-information become "FACT".

A good point to this is Woidich's "110", his own abschüßelist has only eighty-two confirmed claims on, the first eighty-one match the mikrofilms exactly, plus one for 1945. It seems likely now that Ernst Obermeier was fed false information i.e "110" and this has become the reconised truethful number. Woidich didn't attend reunions, and I suspect didn't even know of the mis-information. It would appear that nobody asked him "82 or 110" !!!

I suspect that Hartmann's abschüßelist was stitched together largely by authors given snippets of information from Hartmann himself, probably he gave the flugbuch details correctly 1-150, but what he lacked for details 151-352 he just made-up.........like the real events, allegedly Hartmann used letters he sent home, but perhaps this is made-up also. This has been "cast in stone" for decades. For decades his claims were written-off at fake-claims for no other reason than the huge total, not based on factual investigation, because even if we had reliable Russian losses details he would appeared dodgy anyway because his claims being incorrect information would appear to be fake anyway....worse even than the truth. WE don't actually know the name of a single witness to the Hartmann claims, for these people helped him for whatever reason, and having tried to work-out who they are by Staffel claims, I must confess that I can work-out who these guys are, but not past 1943.

Hartmann was going to be Kommandeur of II./JG52 towards the end of the war, but this was changed because of protests from within this Gruppe, and why such a short spell with JG53. He was unpopular it has been said many time, surely it's because people thought he was dodgy, rather than just envy.

Anyway he spent ten year as a POW because of his "352", so you can say he got his just reward.

Keep Well

Johannes